Once a political position becomes fashionable, it has already won

Edit: I feel like this post is badly written and doesn’t get its point across. As soon as I finish the post I’m working on right now, I’m going to try to fix it. My apologies for any confusion and delay.

I observed a decade or so ago that support for gay marriage had become very popular among the young and fashionable. At that point, I stopped worrying about the issue, on the assumption that support would soon tip 50%.

I never expected trans people to get much popular support, simply because there are so few of them. Facebook and Twitter have proven me wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue fell off people’s radar screens. Trans folk are still considered pretty ‘weird’ by a lot of people.

“Feminism” and “Critical Race Theory” had become quite popular on the internet and among the cool people (at least, by my standards of cool), and have only become more prominent.

Racial issues I expect to continue being fairly high-profile, while feminist issues will remain largely in the background (by which I mean that no one stages large street protests over murdered women.)

Illegal immigration seems like an issue with high potential to become the next big popular thing, especially since it can ride on anti-racism’s coat tails and increasing numbers of young people in this country are people whose families immigrated from Mexico in the first place.

What do you think? What will be the next big thing?

On an unrelated note, I just realized that the “pus” in platypus is from the Greek for foot, eg, octopus, not from Latin, so the plural platypi is pseudo-Latin. I’d go with “platypodes”, since podes is the plural of pus, but then no one would have any idea what I’m saying.

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9 thoughts on “Once a political position becomes fashionable, it has already won”

Platypodes it is. I’m sure I’m hopeless at predicting social trends–but one thing sticks out. The atheist/anti-theist movement seems to be largely young losers/nerds. Probably destined to die out as a trend therefore?

I think atheism is caused by environmental factors, like electricity and multiculturalism, which may not be going away anytime soon. On the other hand, theists (especially Muslims,) are greatly out-breeding atheists, so the question is whether environmental or genetic effects will win out (or maybe genetics will destroy the environmental trends.)

I don’t know if I think that once a political issue has become fashionable, it has already won. I guess it depends on how you are qualifying fashionable. I think that ending gender-based violence in the form of sexual assault and domestic violence are fashionable, but those things are still very prevalent in our society and we still live in a rape culture in which consent is undermined, victims are blamed, and the justice system ignores it. I think that it’s important not to conflate popularity with real institutional change in society and in our consciousness. But, this is an important question to raise.

Rates of violent crime against women, including murder, assault, and rape, have all been down drastically since the end of the late-80s crime wave, not to mention generally falling over the past 1000 years or so across Western nations. It is highly unlikely that we could ever eliminate all crime (not unless we installed anti-crime shock collars on everyone or started employing psychic police officers), but the trends have been quite positive over the past two decades, and just about everybody who matters thinks that rape is bad.

Right. And that is progress, but it’s not winning. Also, the issue isn’t whether or not people think that rape is bad. It’s how they define sexual assault vs. consent and whether or not they blame the victims for it and never hold the perpetrators accountable. The people who matter–the detectives and judges in our justice system–are often telling survivors that what happened to them wasn’t really sexual assault and that it isn’t prosecutable. It happened to me. That’s rape culture. So, I of course agree that this issue being fashionable helps, quite a lot. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t want to say that it means we don’t have to worry about it as an issue anymore. There’s a lot of work to be done on the ground.

It’s an English word now. Go with platypusses. Lots of other foreign words have been Anglicized, especially with regards to plurals. Using the original Greek, Latin or French plurals is an affectation.